Texas DPS is placing the blame on a third-party vendor. Who signed the contract with this vendor? Not the counties. Texas DPS is a state agency, not a county agency. Therefore, the state definitely has some ownership in this error. It is worth noting that the Republican Party has controlled the state of Texas for decades, and\u00a0Shaheen is a Republican. The question now is whether his views on this issue are shared by Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and the rest of the Texas Legislature.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Do they believe that the state has no responsibility for repairing the damage from their state-run agency? Will this be their reason for attacking counties if the backlog created by the state isn’t handled in time? Are they OK with voters from both parties being disenfranchised due to their mistake? Most importantly, is this the lack of accountability we can expect if we allow the GOP to continue to control the state of Texas? If the state doesn’t immediately step up to help county election offices handle this, we have our answer.<\/p>\n
Texas voluntarily handed<\/a> over our voter registration information to the U.S. Justice Department to be run through<\/a> the federal SAVE database. 18 million records were checked, and as of September 2026, exactly 117 cases<\/a> were referred for investigation of potential non-citizen voting.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, at least 178,000 people who followed the rules to register to vote somehow were never added to the voting rolls. The state Republican response is pretty much, “Oh well, the counties will just have to deal with it,” and “Maybe we’ll hold some hearings to look into it.”<\/p>\n The SAVE review is part of the Republican narrative of massive voter fraud through non-citizen voting, yet these voting reviews haven\u2019t produced many facts to support the claim. Meanwhile, our information is given to some hastily produced federal database. I know that I was just given a new Medicare card because of a data breach in that federal program. Did our state representatives even consider the security of our information before handing it over?<\/p>\n The response to DPS not passing along voter info highlights the disdain our leadership in Austin has for local government. So the county might have to use unplanned overtime to process our mistake? Too bad, they shrug. They have a budget. They’ll deal with it. It’s only many thousands of citizens in our state who expected us to do our job competently, only to find out that we didn’t. Maybe we’ll look into it next session.<\/p>\n This independent voter looks at what is going on here and says it’s time for a change in Austin.<\/p>\n So DPS screwed up voter registration. It does not take a rocket scientist to see what is happening. If the Republicans lose big in November, they will say there were voting irregularities and will demand a recount or, better, that the election results be thrown out. If they retain control, the GOP will say it was a fair election and that the DPS just made an “honest mistake.” Republicans are determined to keep their ironclad control of Texas, it seems, by hook or by crook.<\/p>\n Gonzalo Martinez, La Porte<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Texas DPS is placing the blame on a third-party vendor. Who signed the contract with this vendor? Not…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":451058,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[27,29,28],"class_list":["post-451057","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-texas","tag-texas","tag-texas-headlines","tag-texas-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/451057","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=451057"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/451057\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/451058"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=451057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=451057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=451057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}